Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday July 16, 2012 @01:34PM
from the not-in-the-eyes dept.

cylonlover writes "Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a laser shot which boggles the mind: 192 beams delivered an excess of 500 trillion-watts (TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to a target of just two millimeters in diameter. To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."

I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. I'm much more inclined to do this on a turret on the ground than a satellite; although the satellite would make the weapon more effective against space-based targets, it would also allow it to be directed at points on the earth. As a laser beam can't bend, all you could do to attack terrestrial enemies with it is shoot planes/satellites out of the sky.